What’s in a Comparison: Did CPSC See Magnets as Merely a Product Safety Hazard or More?

It’s natural to try to understand new phenomena via comparisons, and that’s certainly been the frequent case in the past few years of the saga of small, strong magnets. I and many others have asked ourselves, “What well-understood products are the magnets like, and what does that say about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of CPSC’s various actions?”

From early on, there was much comparison to balloons and small balls, and it certainly had an initial appeal. They’re all playthings that kids swallow to dangerous effect.

That resemblance led to much discussion of incident data. After all, it was only in the past month that CPSC could say a child had died due to the magnets (never mind the injury data), while small balls and balloons typically kill a handful of of kids every year. This perceived dichotomy, of course, fed the complaints of regulatory overreach, resource misdirection, and (in the wake of the related-but-nonetheless-separate matter of Craig Zucker’s treatment) vindictiveness.

While I understood this thinking even where I saw conflation in the Zucker matter, the approach never seemed quite right to me. Complaining that CPSC didn’t take the same low-key approach to magnets that it takes to small balls and balloons -- and assuming it ought to have -- avoided the question that the comparisons raised:

Why did CPSC see this product as different?

That problem hasn’t gone away. Other recent comparisons to different child-appealing products -- like ATVs and fireworks -- have the same drawback of not answering this pertinent question.

Well, I had an epiphany a few weeks ago during CPSC staff’s briefing on the recommendation to pass the ban. It solidified during last week’s decisional meeting.

It had to do with what was not being articulated -- what was not explicit.

The more I listened to the words that staff and commissioners chose and to their depictions of the hazard, the more I felt that they were describing something beyond an acute product safety hazard.

Rather, they seemed to be describing an environmental hazard. I don’t remember them ever calling it that, but that’s sure what it seemed like.

This was especially true in the discussion aimed at parental responsibility. When staff described their belief that the magnets could “hitch” rides into homes unbeknownst to parents -- or even to the person bringing them in accidentally -- I felt like I was listening to a discussion about how neighborhood lead paint dust or asbestos fibers could enter homes on shoe soles or clothing. Someone from the home merely had to be around the material, and there was a risk of it getting inside -- no intent involved, no responsibility possible -- and children’s lives could be irreversibly damaged if not ended.

Maybe this is an unfounded concern. Maybe it’s just CPSC staff inflating fear to justify their actions. I’ll leave it to others to look at the data to see if CPSC’s portrayal is correct.

In any event, doing so might be a merely academic exercise now that we seem to have entered the denouement of the story.

Perhaps a more useful exercise from industry’s standpoint might be to seek understanding of why advocates focused their defense where they did.

Why did they spend so much time complaining about the perceived unfairness of treating magnets more harshly than balloons, etc., rather than on making the case that small, strong magnets -- despite the similarity of insidious, deadly hazards stemming directly from the characteristics of naturally occurring resource materials -- should be treated differently than lead paint and asbestos?

This case seems to have involved a lot of misunderstanding both about what CPSC does in general and about what it was doing in particular.

Anger, fear, and a self-perception of victimhood, even if justified, will do that.